


how to disappear completely

by serpentheir



Series: how it goes [2]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Intrusive Thoughts, M/M, Mental Health Issues, One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others, Stream of Consciousness, The Princess Bride References, i wanted to play around with Not trying to resolve everything for once, less of a happy ending than i typically write, thats one way to put it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26784940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serpentheir/pseuds/serpentheir
Summary: He starts to feel like he’s floating a little, all the time. It’s like high school chemistry class, when they learned that nothing is ever actually touching anything else because of the space between the atoms. There’s a microscopic gap between his body and his environment, and the disconnect waxes and wanes, but it’s always there. Reminding him that he’s not completely real, not anymore. And if he isn’t real, then none of this is, and his girlfriend never cheated on him with his best friend, because he doesn’t have a girlfriend or a best friend, he just has this room and the things in it and himself.-in which jughead's not built to hold grudges
Relationships: Archie Andrews & Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones, Archie Andrews & Jughead Jones, Archie Andrews/Betty Cooper (Mentioned), Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones (mentioned)
Series: how it goes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1760659
Comments: 13
Kudos: 24





	how to disappear completely

**Author's Note:**

> *this is a sequel (of sorts) to "cause i don't want to stay in the dark" by royalazydaisy! if you haven't read that, i recommend reading it first. also, this fic gets into the headspace of depersonalization/derealization/dissociation, so this may not be suitable for anyone who is sensitive to those sorts of triggers.*  
> thank u jean for 1) providing all the angst and exploration of archie's terrible mental health i could ask for and 2) enabling me to write 5k of jughead being angsty and having terrible mental health. and also for putting up with me taking like 6 months to finish this b/c i had to be in a very specific headspace to write this and feel like it sounded genuine, and also just school and real life shit happened

Jughead is panting by the time he reaches the top of the hill. He bends over, resting his hands on his knees and staring out at the graveyard, hoping the altitude will give him a better vantage point to pick out wherever the hell Archie is. Well – he knows where Archie probably went, but he doesn’t actually know where that _is_. Jughead’s never visited Fred’s grave before.

“Sorry,” he whispers. The words dissipate into the humid evening.

A little further down the hill, there’s a dark shape hunched over a gravestone. Jughead takes a deep breath and starts back down the hill again, silently hoping that it actually is Archie, because if not, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s about to walk into. To be fair, he doesn’t really know either way.

He stops short a few rows of graves behind the figure, and he knows it’s Archie. Even though he can’t see his red hair, the dead giveaway, Jughead just knows. Something about the general size and shape of Archie is sort of just burned into his memory, he guesses. He wipes a hand over his face and approaches the headstone carefully.

Archie’s asleep. Jughead has slept in some weird fucking places over the course of his life, but he thinks Archie might have him beat with this one. He hesitates before waking Archie up. He’s never liked it – not even when they were kids, during sleepovers when Jughead always woke up first. He knows Archie must not be getting enough sleep these days. Jughead gently shakes him awake anyways, fingers digging into the smooth fabric of Archie’s suit jacket.

Archie’s hand shoots out like a zombie reaching out of the grave and grabs Jughead’s wrist in a vice grip. Jughead yanks his hand back, wincing. “Jesus Christ, Archie.” He looks at his wrist, but it’s too dark to see if it left a mark.

“Jug.” Archie responds weakly.

Jughead doesn’t make eye contact, just keeps his eyes trained on his wrist. It’ll probably bruise too, damn it. Like he hasn’t already been injured enough during the past few weeks. “I guess that’s what I get for waking a guy who fell asleep on a grave,” he says dryly.

“Sorry.” Archie’s voice is thin. Hollow. “Are you okay?”

Jughead shrugs. “I’ll live.” He glances down at Archie, and their eyes meet for a split second before Archie turns away.

Jughead crouches down, bringing his face level with Archie’s, and has to steady himself on the grass; the slope of the hill throws him off. “What about you?” he asks. “We’ve been looking for you for hours.” As if on cue, a chill runs through him, turning the drying sweat on his shirt bitterly cold.

“I…” Archie starts. “I shut off my phone.”

Jughead narrows his eyes. “Why?”

Archie opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, and Jughead can practically hear the _I don’t know_ that’s about to come out of Archie’s mouth. He’s preemptively angry at first, angry at Archie for all the times he’s said he _doesn’t know_ , but then he takes in the whole picture again – Archie still partially hunched over Fred’s headstone, grass and mud staining his clothes like he’s been here for hours, and Jughead remembers the bus station. Toledo. Trying to run to the last safe place he had when everything else was falling apart around him. He remembers his mother’s voice on the phone, and he watches Archie’s hand as it clenches and unclenches in the grass covering his father’s grave, and he thinks he might understand.

Archie’s voice cuts through his thoughts. “I kissed Betty.”

Jughead very quickly realizes that he does _not_ understand, not in the least.

His hands go cold first, then the rest of his body. It feels like his stomach is sinking, anchoring him to the earth. He doesn’t understand, but he feels something inside him go dull, and numb, and it’s the closest thing to calm he’s felt in a while.

“You kissed Betty,” Jughead repeats.

He’s talking on autopilot, his mouth and vocal cords working of their own accord without input from his brain. Like he’s been rehearsing this conversation in his head. And maybe he has been, for longer than he knows. Maybe that gnawing feeling in the back of his head had never gone away, the one that told him he was never good enough, that he would never be right for anyone, that Archie and Betty and everyone else only kept him around out of pity. That he was too much of a burden to be worth keeping. Maybe that voice was right after all.

He hears his own voice without hearing the words, but he knows they’re bitter, and he doesn’t feel anything. He’s talking and he can’t even hear what he’s saying anymore. His voice echoes around the two of them in the chilly, stifling humidity of the graveyard, and Archie’s face goes all pained and blank at the same time: the expression Jughead’s gotten used to seeing on him lately. And he still doesn’t feel anything.

He hears himself stop talking. Archie isn’t looking at him anymore.

He figures he should leave, now, that’s what a real person would do in this situation, so he stands up and turns on his heel, but he doesn’t walk away yet. Even as numb as he is, part of him is waiting – _hoping,_ desperately, that Archie will say something to make this okay.

Jughead waits. And he keeps waiting. And he starts to feel silly just standing there waiting for something to come, so he snaps.

“For fuck’s sake, _say_ something, Archie. Why the hell would you do that?” He feels his voice crack, and he can’t bring himself to even care. Through the numbness, he _hopes_ Archie heard him waver. Hopes it made him feel worse.

“I don’t know—” Archie starts, and Jughead’s suddenly sick of this shit, sick of giving him the benefit of the doubt. He kneels down in front of Archie again and goes to grab him by the shoulders, but stops himself short, hands hovering over Archie’s shoulders without touching.

“ _No_ , you don’t get to say that. You don’t get to just _kiss my girlfriend_ , _lie_ about it for weeks, and say you don’t _know_ , Archie. You just _don’t_.”

“Well I _don’t_ , Jughead. Why the hell did you _ask me to_ literally _weeks_ before?” Archie spits back.

The rage that wells up in Jughead’s chest – that rare kind that makes him feel like he’s burning up from the inside out – is the first real thing he’s felt in so long. He’s desperate to hang onto it.

He fires back at Archie, more words that he doesn’t think about first, just spits them out one by one, and in a way, it feels good. It feels like _something_. And that’s more than he can say for anything else in the past couple of weeks.

He goes to turn around again, ready to stalk off somewhere and wait for Archie or Betty or someone to feel bad for him and make it all better again. But then he realizes he can’t go home, because home equals Betty. He’s fucked either way.

Archie’s still slumped on the ground, looking more dead than alive, and the cloud of anger pressing in on all sides of Jughead subsides into resignation, just enough that he can reach through it and pull Archie to his feet.

Jughead’s cold, and Archie looks cold, and he’s sick of being in the graveyard and sick of how fucked up everything is now – how things somehow keep getting _more_ fucked up – and he doesn’t want to think about it anymore. He makes the executive decision to drive both of them back to Archie’s house, because a warm bed in a house he knows seems like maybe the only thing that could make him feel better right now.

* * *

While Archie’s in the shower, Jughead opens up Archie’s laptop and finds a link to watch _The Princess Bride_. He’s seen it so many times that he knows all the words by now. The movie makes sense to him; he knows it has a happy ending, so he presses play and asks Archie to shut up. They settle in next to each other, uneasy but still buoyed for now by the flickering screen, a familiar, safe distraction.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Archie says softly. On the screen, Westley says _I will always come for you._

“I know,” Jughead mutters.

“I don’t know what I would’ve done if—”

“I know.” _Please don’t make this harder than it has to be_ , he thinks.

“You’re not…mad?”

Jughead sighs and reaches forward, pressing the spacebar to pause the movie. “Of course I’m mad. Just not about that.” He picks his words carefully, not wanting to minimize the fuck-up, but knowing Archie has to be in a pretty bad place, too. “I’m pissed, and I…I don’t know why you always _do_ this, Archie.”

Jughead pulls his knees up in front of him, crosses his arms over them, and rests his chin on his forearm. “But I know I can’t lose you,” he says, half muffled by his arm.

“I can’t lose you either,” Archie replies.

Jughead _knows_ that, but he can’t for the life of him figure out why Archie would do _any_ of this shit in the first place if he was actually scared of losing him. Maybe Archie figured he would stick around no matter what. After all, it’s not like he has anywhere else to go.

“Don’t sweat it,” Jughead says tonelessly. “Wouldn’t be the first time you chose a girl over me.”

He can feel Archie react, jolting back like he’s been slapped. Jughead tries not to care.

“’m sorry.” His voice is barely audible.

“I know.”

Jughead leans forward and hits play, the plastic _clack_ of the keyboard punctuating his words.

* * *

Jughead wakes up early the next morning. For a blissful, easy second, it’s just another Saturday morning at Archie’s house, and the two of them have a few hours to hold onto each other under the plausible deniability of sleep, and soon they’re going to go downstairs and make pancakes.

But the light looks different coming through the window now, too white and cold. He sits up in bed, and now he can see Betty’s window across the way. His window. Except it still feels like hers, and can’t stop looking at it, can’t stop thinking about it and it starts driving him crazy, so he leaves before Archie wakes up.

He’s on the side of the bed closer to the wall, like always, and over the course of years of sleepovers, he’s mastered the technique of getting out of Archie’s bed without waking him up. He scoots down to the end of the bed and steps down carefully, and one of the floorboards creaks. He looks up at Archie, holding his breath. Archie opens his eyes slightly. And then closes them.

Jughead can’t tell if he saw him or not, if Archie was still too asleep to notice him leaving or if he did notice and just didn’t care. He slips out the back door and heads to the bunker, because he doesn’t know anywhere else to go.

He drops his bag onto the floor, then climbs down the rungs carefully, one by one. He looks around the room for a couple of seconds. And then he screams. It just sort of happens. Not really a conscious thing, but he hears himself screaming and then he hears himself stop, and he doesn’t even feel any different.

 _I’m screaming into an empty room_ , he thinks. _Maybe this is rock bottom. Well, at least I know I can still make noise._

He figures he’s allowed to pity himself for a little while. Lick his wounds and all that.

 _If I lose my shit in an underground bunker and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?_ He thinks, and then shakes his head. He feels like an idiot, screaming into an empty fucking room. Making noise just to hear his own voice.

What if they were faking it? Everyone. What if he wasn’t meant to get back up that night? Maybe everyone’s lives would be better if he hadn’t. Maybe they’d been hoping he wouldn’t.

They saved his life. He wishes they hadn’t.

Not for this, at least, because what kind of life is he supposed to have now? What is he supposed to _do_ now? He’s still a ghost, still stuck in fucking purgatory and he thought they brought him back from the dead but maybe he’s still in-between and he doesn’t know how to get out, doesn’t know what unfinished business he has to resolve.

He doesn’t have anything anymore. Not really.

Everyone else has mourned him and moved on. They had their couple nights of sadness and now they’re all going to be okay. The people who were supposed to care – supposed to _know_ him, supposed to bring him back and help him be part of their world again – fucked it up.

If he wanted to be dramatic about this, he’d say he feels like he’s in a fishtank, banging on the glass and looking at Archie and Betty on the outside and shouting but they can’t hear him and they just keep smiling and waving. But the thing is, he knows they’d listen if he’d let them. The problem is that he won’t let them, can’t bring himself to let them. He doesn’t want them to.

The voice of his ten-year-old self is in his head and it won’t leave him alone. The version of himself that wanted to run away with his best friend and never have to deal with anyone else ever again and have it be just the two of them against the world for the rest of his life. _You promised_ , he’s saying to Archie, or maybe to himself. _You promised you would_.

He and Archie _had_ promised each other that, he remembers. Back when they were young enough that they could pretend they’d always be the same, forever and ever. Before their town forced a rift between them and pried them apart.

Maybe all he’d ever wanted was to stay the same.

He’s always prided himself on being good with change. _Besides_ , he’s said more times than he can count, _my life’s been nothing_ but _change_. _I didn’t really have a choice_. And it’s true; he’s survived a hell of a lot of chaos – his family has fallen down around him and rebuilt itself, only to fall apart spectacularly all over again, but _this_ was supposed to be safe. Stable. He and Betty were supposed to bond over their fucked-up families, to accept the _darkness_ in each other or whatever – the point is, he was supposed to understand her. And she was supposed to understand him too; she was supposed to trust him. When shit got hard for her, he was supposed to know about it. He was supposed to be her person.

Her _rock_.

She didn’t tell him. She didn’t tell him, she told Archie, and Archie didn’t tell him either, and he was busy being _dead_ to the world on a hospital bed miles away while they were pretending to be in love. Because that’s all it was supposed to be – pretending. And he’d trusted them.

He wonders, now, the cinderblock walls swimming in front of his eyes, if they’d done this before.

It was supposed to be the three of them against the world. Ever since they were kids. Archie and Betty and Jughead, like equal sides of a triangle. Best friends. No one left out.

He’d known about Betty’s feelings for Archie, obviously, but he’d believed her when she said that was over. He’d believed that she loved him enough, and he’d trusted her that she meant what she said and it was over, everything between her and Archie dead and buried. Like he nearly was.

They saved his life. And he wonders if it would’ve been easier for them if he died. Wonders if a part of them was hoping for it. And while he knows, mostly, that of _course_ they didn’t want him to die – they’re his best friends – he can’t help but feel like he’s come back to life in a world that doesn’t want him there.

 _I’m alone_ , he thinks to himself, rather hysterically.

He knows he’s being dramatic, but at the same time, self-pity is one of the last comforts he has left. So he lets himself stare at his phone, void of all notifications. No one wanting to talk to him. No one trying to reach him. And he decides to just let himself become unreachable.

At first, he comes back to his family’s house every night, says hi to his dad and eats dinner there so he can at least pretend like he’s still real. He sleeps on the couch, because he can’t bring himself to sleep in Betty’s room, much less in the same bed. He avoids her as much as he can. On the rare occasions when they do run into each other, the look of pity she gives him – like he’s a kicked puppy – makes him want to crawl out of his skin.

He ducks out early every morning and starts spending more time in the bunker. When he’s down there for long enough, the little underground structure starts to feel like a coffin. But that doesn’t scare him anymore – when he’s there by himself, he has a barrier between himself and the rest of the world, and he can come and go at please. It already feels like there’s a veil between him and the rest of the world. Might as well make it real, he figures.

He goes days without sunlight. Skips school, heads to the bunker early in the morning, and starts sleeping there again, too, ducking out every once in a while to grab food before returning to his little haven. Funny how you get used to a place. Funny how what used to feel like a prison so quickly became the only place he feels safe.

The days slip and slide together, punctuated only by getting up to eat every once in a while, or going to sleep, or waking up. He gets used to the surroundings again – although he’d never really readjusted to normal life, so there’s not much to get used to. There’s really nothing new in his surroundings for his brain to process, given that he’d already spent weeks there, so it does what brains do: it starts to make things up.

First, it’s Joan’s perfume.

He’ll suddenly smell it out of nowhere, coming up from somewhere behind him, and every time he jerks around so quickly he pulls muscles in his neck and shoulders, his whole body tense like _this time, this time he’ll see it coming, this time he’ll run._ This time he’ll do it right.

Sometimes it’s the cold.

He still doesn’t know how long he was lying there unconscious in the forest before Archie and Betty and Veronica found him. Now, it feels almost too inconsequential to ask anyone – and who would he ask, really? – but it bothers him that he doesn’t know. That he was lying there for some undefined amount of time, dead to the world, and his body barely made it.

When they’d finally found him and managed to resuscitate him, that’s what he’d woken up to: the cold. Not the pain in his head; his head hadn’t hurt at all. He couldn’t feel his face, couldn’t tell there was blood on it, but he’d felt the cold of the earth seeping up into him. He’d been there at least long enough that it had started to take him. _Fucking overdramatic_ , he tells himself as he recounts the memory, but he can never really shake the sense that he’d been so close to dying there, becoming part of the forest forever.

And now he lies on the cot in the bunker for hours at a time, nothing to do, and eventually that cold feeling comes back, a damp chill permeating through the thin t-shirt on his back, numbing his skin.

He wonders if, maybe, he was never supposed to come back at all. If he was supposed to die there, and that’s why everything has been so fucked up since he came back.

* * *

He stops checking his phone. Betty and Archie don’t look for him. His dad is worried at first, but he’s busy enough with sheriff duties that he’s willing to believe Jughead’s half-assed excuses about catching up on classwork and spending time at the library studying, instead of dissociating underground in a glorified metal casket.

The truth is, he hasn’t done a single page of his homework. He’d gotten as far as picking up the papers strewn around the bunker from his fight with Betty and then gave up, because, sure, maybe it’s immature, but the meticulously organized binders with the neat handwriting and calendars with clearly marked application deadlines just feel like _her_ and he can’t stand doing anything that she’d want him to do.

He still writes – it’s the only thing he has left to do – but nothing he writes makes any sense, and none of it is any good. He opens up the same Word document day after day and pours out his stream of consciousness onto the page for hours at a time, then shuts his laptop and walks away and still doesn’t feel any better.

He lost thirty-six hours. The last thing he remembers is Joan’s perfume behind him, and then everything goes black. Thirty-six hours in a hospital bed. Anything could’ve happened. They saved his life, but his body couldn’t even decide if it wanted to keep going. They saved his life, but for what?

Once he stops checking his phone, his sense of time starts to slip, too. Underground, there’s no sunlight or darkness to dictate the time; he just sleeps when he’s too exhausted to stay awake anymore, or when he can’t stand thinking any more, and eats when he remembers to, because he doesn’t feel hungry very much anymore, either. Even Pop’s feels wrong now.

Everything tastes just like it used to. _Everything_ on the outside is still the same.

It shouldn’t still be the same, he thinks. The truth is, though, his death didn’t really change anything.

He rewatches the recordings of the funeral on repeat until he has everything practically memorized, until it feels real. Even though he knows it’s fake, watching his own funeral – watching his friends mourn over his casket and get into fights at the wake – combined with the endless, suffocating silence in the bunker, makes him feel like maybe he _is_ dead after all. Or at the very least, the line he’s walking between death and life is unsure. Blurred.

Some fucked-up part of him had always wanted to see what his own funeral would be like. See how people would react to his death. He’s not sure what he would even be looking for – proof that he existed, maybe. Proof that people cared.

He’d thought about it in quick glimpses, especially on bad days. Sometimes, when he was alone, especially at night, he’d let the fantasy play itself out: montages of locker memorials, a hallway of kids wearing black, his friends talking about how much they miss him, and everyone who treated him badly regretting it for the rest of their lives. (Or just for the rest of the year. At most).

The thing was, those daydreams always revolved around the idea that his death would shake the foundation of Riverdale – that everything would be different once he was dead, that everyone would miss him. But when that morbid fantasy faded, the rational part of his brain always pointed out the truth: a world without him would, except for a few miniscule differences, be exactly the same.

And, although he’d never expected to find that out for real, he knows now that he was right.

He watches Archie give his little eulogy over and over, listens to Betty read that section of Sherlock Holmes until his ears ring, but instead of proving that they care about him, it does the opposite. He listens to their voices until they pass the point of sounding real, and they start to feel hollow. He pictures himself inside the casket, imagines Betty and Archie and everyone else walking up one by one and staring blankly at his cold, lifeless body.

He watches it so many times that it doesn’t make him feel anything anymore, because he knows what happened afterward. That after that big, grand spectacle of mourning, everyone was allowed to go back to normal, and they all stopped pretending like his death actually changed anything.

* * *

When he does sleep, he dreams about dying. Sometimes, when he wakes up, he tries to fall back asleep, to stay in the dream a little longer, because even though he doesn’t _want_ to be dead, anything would be better than the in-between state he’s stuck in now: not actually dead, but not really alive, either.

He dreams about Freddy Krueger chasing after him, except he’s got Betty’s face, and sometimes he stops running to see if he’ll get caught. Just to see what happens. She never catches him. He stops running, so she doesn’t have anything to chase anymore. He stops moving forward; she gives up.

He wonders when exactly it was that she gave up on him. He doesn’t know which is worse: thinking about Archie and Betty suddenly having a _moment_ together, struck by all-consuming passion or true love or whatever, or thinking about the two of them planning this.

The second one, he thinks. That’s definitely worse. All the days he spent writing and playing detective with Betty, days he spent with Archie, watching the same old movies they always watch and laughing at all the same scenes, and all the while they were just waiting for him to be out of the picture. Like he was just an obstacle they had to overcome so they could finally be together.

He tries not to think about Archie, but long days bleeding into nights in the bunker leave him with barely anything to do except stare at the wall, or the ceiling, or his hands, and _think_.

He thinks about Archie kissing Betty, mostly. The not-knowing, he realizes, is worse than actually knowing what happened. Because the absence of a concrete event sets his mind off on tangents, spinning out sickening little movies where she and Archie are kissing in his-and-Betty’s room, in their _bed_ , in all the spaces Jughead used to think only belonged to the two of them.

The disjointed sleeping and eating patterns, along with the loss of all sense of day and night, start to fuck with his body. He finds himself checking for proof that he’s really there. He catalogues the dent in the mattress after he gets up, the shadow he casts on the walls, presses his fingers into the wax at the edge of a lit candle just to make sure he can still feel it. He pulls his hand back before he gets burned. He doesn’t want to start a fire, after all.

He starts to feel like he’s floating a little, all the time. It’s like high school chemistry class, when they learned that nothing is ever actually touching anything else because of the space between the atoms. There’s a microscopic gap between his body and his environment, and the disconnect waxes and wanes, but it’s always there. Reminding him that he’s not completely real, not anymore. And if he isn’t real, then none of this is, and his girlfriend never cheated on him with his best friend, because he doesn’t have a girlfriend or a best friend, he just has this room and the things in it and himself.

* * *

One day, he wakes up, and he knows he needs to leave. It’s that simple. One too many days waking up without knowing what time it is, breathing in the same air, driving himself insane ruminating over the same circuit of catastrophizing thoughts. And, honestly, he feels like he’s done this long enough – the whole disappearing act was dramatic in the first place, but now it’s just stupid. The little voice in the back of his head hoping that someone would come to find him has disappeared; he knows now that he can vanish without anyone bothering to look for him.

He grabs his bag, shoves the few things he brought with him into it, and climbs the ladder out of the bunker. The fresh air almost knocks the wind out of him, warm and humid after god knows how long in the cold, stale underground. It doesn’t feel right being out on the streets, walking around like he’s one of them, just a normal member of the town, inasmuch as you could actually call anyone in Riverdale normal.

Without really thinking about it, but somehow still unsurprisingly, he ends up in front of Archie’s house. Standing in front of the door, waiting to press the doorbell, with the porch light shining on him makes him feel uncomfortably exposed. He realizes he hadn’t really thought this part through. What the hell was he thinking? What the hell will Archie think?

He forces all the thoughts out of his head and presses the doorbell. For a split second, it’s silent, and he wonders if the doorbell is broken. If the universe is playing another stupid joke on him. And then the stairs creak as someone walks down to the door, and Archie’s face is behind the glass, contorting into an expression Jughead can’t recognize.

“Hey,” Jughead says, deadpan. Archie just stares at him. Jughead starts to wonder if maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

Jughead glances behind himself, checking that the stairs are still there, thinking _I’ll count to ten and then I’ll leave_.

Archie still doesn’t say anything. Jughead feels like the inevitable heat-death of the universe. He feels so fucking stupid. And then Archie opens the door and steps aside to let him in, and Jughead can walk in, can move, which means he doesn’t have to think anymore.

Whether it’s out of surprise, shock, or shame, Archie stays quiet while Jughead takes off his jacket and shoes, and silently follows Jughead upstairs into his room. He sits down on the edge of Archie’s bed, suddenly feeling like gravity is pulling him down twice as hard.

“Can I sleep here?” he asks, voice coming out scratchy and pitchy from the lack of use. He coughs slightly and glances up tentatively to gauge Archie’s response.

Archie’s staring at him, gaze unwavering. “Are you okay?”

Jughead lets out a dry, acidic laugh. 

“Okay,” Archie says after a moment.

Jughead pulls his hat off and tosses it in the general direction of Archie’s nightstand before scooting over to the other side of the bed. Facing the wall with his back to Archie, he curls up into a ball and closes his eyes. He can feel Archie just sort of standing there behind him, hovering awkwardly.

The air shifts as Archie leaves the room. The water turns on, then off. Then back on, and off again. Jughead squeezes his eyes shut and tries to go to sleep, but even though he’s fucking exhausted, it feels like every cell in his body is awake now, buzzing with nerves and the weirdness of it all.

Archie comes back in and shuffles through his dresser drawers before switching the light off. Eventually, Jughead feels the mattress sink under Archie’s weight as he lies down next to him, carefully keeping a few inches of space between them.

The silence between them yawns open, wide and stifling and impassable. A thought – a memory – claws at the back of Jughead’s mind.

“Archie,” Jughead mumbles.

There’s no response.

He raises his voice, turning his head slightly so he’s talking less to the wall and more to Archie. “ _Archie_.”

“Hmm?” comes Archie’s voice, muffled from where his face is buried in the pillows.

"How did you do it?" Jughead asks, his voice scratchy and out of place in the cool, silent night air.

"Huh?" Archie rolls over to face him.

Neither of them breaks eye contact. The moonlight reflects off Archie’s eyes, and the tiny spots of light move back and forth as Archie scans his face, looking for…Jughead doesn’t know what.

"You died, once, too. How did you start feeling like a person again?"

"I don't know," Archie mumbles, his eyes downcast. "I think...I think maybe I never did."

Jughead doesn’t say anything. There isn’t anything for him to say, anyways. Archie keeps looking at him like he’s waiting for him to respond, and Jughead knows he can’t. He meets Archie’s eyes and manages to make eye contact for a few seconds – it’s easier in the dark – before rolling over to face the wall.

“Goodnight,” Jughead says quietly.

He hears Archie shifting, rustling the sheets as he settles into the pillows again.

“Goodnight,” Archie replies, and tugs the blanket over himself.

The blanket slides off Jughead's shoulder and he suddenly feels the cold night air seeping in, raising goosebumps on his exposed skin. Although the stark chill stings, nerve endings firing and making blood rise to the surface, he knows, like a patient recovering from hypothermia, that at least it means he isn’t numb anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: in my notes for this fic i just kept calling it "jean's fic" bc i didn't have a title but im too lazy to punctuate things so it would just be "jeans fic" and somewhere along the line i started referring to it in my head as The Jeans Fic despite it having nothing to do with jeans whatsoever


End file.
